Why there are so many languages in the world?

People across the world describe their thoughts and emotions, share experiences and spread ideas through the use of thousands of distinct languages. These languages form a fundamental part of our humanity. They determine whom we communicate with and how we express ourselves.

Before the information age people were not only scattered abroad but isolated by oceans, mountains, and many other barriers. Each group of people did what came naturally and began to communicate with one another. All people had the ability to speak. As they began to invent language many different ones evolved. As some moved away they took what they had and started over making a similar yet very different language. For example German - English - Hindi - Dutch And language began to evolve on its own creating dialects and so on.

Also when people who spoke different languages met up they borrowed words for things they had no words for. This is a very over simplification of how languages developed but it serves to give some idea what happened as man migrated and as languages evolved around the world.

Despite continually mapping the distribution of languages across the world, scientists have few clear answers about what caused the emergence of thousands of languages. Collectively, human beings speak more than 7,000 distinct languages, and these languages are not uniformly distributed across the planet. For example, far more languages are spoken in tropical regions than in temperate areas.